My ticket for last night’s M83 show was printed on December 21, 2004. My goodness I’ve been sitting on this one for a while. I was attending this one more out of curiosity than fandom – I have the first M83 record and like it alright, but it hasn’t managed to really enrapture me. In fact, it seems to cause blackouts – I know what the first three songs sound like, and the last one or two, but that middle section? It could be 30 minutes of goats bleating for all I can remember, though I suppose that’s a testament to the album’s effectiveness as aural wallpaper. But livestock notwithstanding, I’d heard some good things about the live show and I really did want to be convinced.

I’ve mentioned before how unimpressed I was with Ulrich Schnauss at SxSW – what I’ve heard of his recorded output is quite nice but live, it seemed rather pointless. But I was totally willing to give him another shot, and it’s and good thing, too. You see, I’ve figured out the secret to enjoying Ulrich Schnauss live: Close your eyes. If you have them open, you’re fixated on this guy at his laptop, having a beer and banging away on a keyboard and wondering just what the hell it is you’re looking at. Close them, and the sonic experience creates outworldish images in your head of windswept plains, impossibly high mountaintops, churning oceans… Open them again and you’re wondering what is up with this guy’s hair. I spent most of the set with them closed, obvs. Hey, it’s not his fault – laptop music is hard to make (visually) interesting in a live context. It was funny – he finished his set and walked offstage to great applause, and came back out a minute later. The audience thought he was going to do an encore, but he actually just wanted to shut down his laptop.

My favourite track off M83’s Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts is the live recording of “Gone”, found on the bonus disc that came with some pressings. The full band arrangement gives it a much-needed kick and gives the inherently synthetic nature of the composition an organic dimension that pushes it from like to love. So the fact that M83 tour as a four-piece rock band gave me high hopes for the show. High hopes, but I honestly didn’t expect anything on the scale of what went down at Lee’s last night. I think that performance may now be the benchmark by which I judge all other concerts – if a show doesn’t have the visceral impact of a thousand kidney punches or a 70-minute IMAX best-of Bruckheimer video compilation, I’m just not interested. No, I’m not serious, but M83 did put on a show of ridiculous drama, intensity and just all-out over-the-topness. Surprisingly guitar-heavy and featuring an absurdly precise drummer – in fact, the entire band was dead-on and the mix was amazingly clear – this was a performance worthy of the “next My Bloody Valentine” tag that they (or he, M83 mastermind Anthony Gonzalez) often gets saddled with. Based on the albums, I would argue the point. Based on the show, not so much.

Let me try and articulate just how epic the show was. Imagine the final battle scene from Lord Of The Rings, except all the combatants are wielding lightsabres, there are volcanoes erupting all around them, and oh yeah – it’s in space. And oh yeah, it’s all happening in space (The rings of Saturn, to be precise) and the really dramatic bits are all in slow motion. Natch. Well that’s how it looks in MY head. Okay, that’s a little much, but seriously – the sound was so cinematic and massive, it’s hard not to get caught up in trying to describe it. If any act deserved to be named after a galaxy, it’s M83. I may have been unconvinced about them (him?) before last night, but I’m not anymore. In fact, I’m afraid the studio albums (I still need to pick up Before The Dawn Heals Us) will be a disappointment by comparison. This is one band that deserves a properly-recorded live document. Whoo.

Not the best batch of photos I’ve ever taken, the lighting was pretty tough to work with, but there’s some decent shots in there even if the don’t quite capture the grandeur of it all. And I’m sorry if this review is a little silly, I wrote it fairly late last night. You should see the first draft. There were midget Valkyries with laser beams shooting from their eyes in there.

Sleater-Kinney tour their new album The Woods (out May 24) through Toronto on June 18 at the Phoenix. Dead Meadow support.

If you weren’t at Sunday’s Shins show or that wasn’t enough for you, head over to You Ain’t No Picasso. He’s got the entirety of the band’s recent Austin City Limits performance available to download.

Wilco are playing four nights in May at the Vic in Chicago for a live DVD to be released, um, later. Sam Jones, director of the I Am Trying To Break Your Heart documentary, will be in charge of putting it all together.

Nobody cares that you’re a DJ – it’s funny ’cause it’s true. Of course, no one cares that I’m a hack musician either, so I guess we’re even. From Miss Modernage.

I wonder if it’s a conscious decision on the part of DC to have similar “govermnet versus heroes” storylines running in both their regular DCU comic titles and the animated Justice League Unlimited series. They’re finally back with new episodes (check out bit torrent, yo) and the latest one has Project Cadmus sending in the Suicide Squad to infiltrate JL headquarters. Granted, no one executes any Justice Leaguers like in Countdown (that can’t possibly qualify as a spoiler anymore), but it’s still fairly grim, thematically, and has some surprisingly knock-down, vicious hand-to-hand fight scenes (Atom Smasher! Shining Knight! Gotta love the obscure cameos). This second season of JLU is shaping up real nice.

Yet anothor Questionable Content follow-up – I direct you to Indietits, another project from the creator of QC. It’s not what you think… Unless you think it’s comic strips of small birds making jokes about indie bands/culture, then it’s exactly what you think.

np – Mum / Finally We Are No One

Looking for video of Dinosaur Jr’s performance on The Late Late Show Friday? Go here to download a video clips of the reunited band play “The Lung” on national television. Yeah, you have to register, but think about it – if that’s the worst thing that happens to you today, you’re doing alright. The band sounded so good and had just the right amount of slop – now I really want them to announce a Toronto date. But I wonder, will they only play Lou-era material, or will they play stuff from the Warner albums? ‘Cause I do love me some Green Mind and Where You Been… Thanks to Jeremy for passing on the link.

Pitchfork gets some more details about the new Broken Social Scene record and deflates the idea that there might be a triptych of new albums released over the next year. Kevin Drew calls it, “Raw fucking puke and love” – the boy has a way with words, does he not?

Junkmedia chit-chats with Will Johnson in the context of frontman for South San Gabriel. Their new album The Carlton Chronicles: Not Until The Operation’s Through came out last month. Coincidentally, Pitchfork has a lukewarm review of the record today.

Mean Street talks to Andy Williams, drummer for Doves, about working with an outside producer for the first time on Some Cities. The band will release the Live In Eden EP next week, but you won’t find it on Amazon or in HMV. Like Death Cab’s recent The John Byrd EP, it’s only available through select indie record stores in the US (like this one). I don’t know how much of an effort I’ll make to get this – I have the Where We’re Calling From DVD and this is just an audio document of the same show featured therein. A CD version would be nice but probably not worth the effort it’d take to get a copy.

Following up from yesterday, I am currently addicted to Questionable Content. Or I was, now that I’ve read all 341 comic strips in one day, I have to be content with the one new one a day. Taking aim at indie kids, emo kids, goth kids, geeks and the lovelorn in general, it’s painfully obvious that I am a target market with this strip, but I don’t care – it’s great. Even though it’s by a guest artist, this one would have made me snort milk up my nose had I been drinking milk. So good. I simply have to get one of these Sad Guitar t-shirts. It looks like my Jazzmaster! But mine red, not yellow, and it is happy, not sad. It does crave new strings, however, and I must oblige.

24: The day is 3/4 done! This Marwan fellow – word on the street is that he’s the man responsible for today’s events. There needs to be a 24 drinking game where you have a shot anytime someone says that. Okay, here’s my theory on how Palmer gets back in the picture – since they’re making Logan a ridiculous charicature of an incompotent president (the buggy eyes are a nice touch), Mike is gonna take a page out of Jack’s playbook and taser him in the washroom, then sneak his old boss into the bunker through the catering entrance. And it was good to see the return of Badass Jack – not a man I would want waiting for me at the jungle gym at recess, no way no how. I think he somehow managed to break more than five of that dude’s fingers. Maybe he broke some of the broken ones even moreso? I don’t know my US geography so well, what’s within an hour or two of Jefferson City, Iowa that’d be worth blowing up?

np – M Ward / Transistor Radio

I went into last night’s Shins show with equal parts anticipation and trepidation – actually, it was mostly trepidation. Call me a snob if you want, but I don’t like the Kool Haus (big concrete room, pain in the ass to get to), I don’t like all-ages shows (all you kids who love all-ages shows will understand the minute you turn 19) and I don’t like shows whose audience crosses too far into the mainstream (I’ve worked hard in my life to ensure minimal interaction with jocks and frat boys). This show could potentially be a perfect storm of all three – after all, this wasn’t so much the Chutes Too Narrow tour as it was the Garden State tour. Well I’m pleased to say my main misgivings were mostly unfounded. Yeah, the Kool Haus is still a crap venue but there’s not much to be done about that, but there were thankfully none of the unbridled shrieking or “whoo!”-ing that I had expected with the kids and the jocks. Everyone was just there to enjoy the show and have a good time, a-yup.

7-piece Kiwi collective The Brunettes were the openers for the whole tour and I couldn’t think of a better choice to warm up for The Shins. Paul has waxed ecstatic about this act for a while now, but it was only after seeing them live that I fully appreciated their charm. They remind me of a group of music Summer camp escapees who made off with the entire stash of instruments. They had an unbelievable number of instruments onstage with them, from keyboards and glockenspiels to triangles, clarinets, trumpets, cello, saxophones, banjos, castanets, to say nothing of their liberal use of finger snaps and hand claps. With every band member contributing on vocals backing the he-said, she-said lead vox of Heather Mansfield and Jonathan Bree, the result was a gloriously giddy, sun-kissed, retro-pop cacaphony.

Sure, you’re not going to find great profundity in the lyrical content but with music like this, what are you going to sing about, forgiving the third-world debt? C’mon. If you want an idea of where they’re coming from, all you need to know is that they dedicated the last song of their set to the Commonwealth and the metric system, and all donned cardboard masks of Full House-era Mary Kate and/or Ashley Olsen. Really, there was no way to not love them. I dashed out to the lobby right after their set to buy a copy of Mars Loves Venus.

The last time I saw the Shins, it was in a 100-capacity venue. Now they were playing to a crowd twenty times that size. Naturally, I had concerns as to how the Shins’ brand of folky indie-pop would translate in a large, unforgiving room such as the Kool Haus. Answer? About as well as could be expected. Their setlist drew heavily from the more upbeat portion of their repetoire, which was ironic as the quieter, acoustic numbers such as “Young Pilgrims” and the ubiquitous “New Slang” actually came across the best, sonically. The more amped up numbers had the soundman struggling with the craptacular acoustics of the room – it’s saying something that the set was even as listenable as it was. Oh, and the fun cover of the night was The Magnetic Fields’ “Strange Powers”. I approve.

I was also pleasantly surprised how comfortable the band seemed to be on such a large stage (I’m talking real estate). I guess I forgot that they’ve been growing as performers with their audience since the last time they came through town and it hasn’t been as much of an overnight explosion in popularity. James was a bit chattier than he had been in the past, though it was still Marty who assumed the majority of the frontman/banter responsibilities. From where I was, I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying but there was a comment about bagels followed by him showing off his midriff to the crowd. Yeah, I dunno. But it was evident the band was having a great time, as was the crowd and hell – even the oppressive venue couldn’t stifle that. Good show all around.

And as a postscript, big thumbs up to the band for keeping merch prices down. I’ve never seen anyone sell t-shirts at the Kool Haus for $20 before. Very nice. And sorry, no photos – I had no interest in trying to smuggle a camera in nor fight my way through the great unwashed to get close enough to get any sort of decent shots. Yeah, them’s the breaks. But did anyone get a digicam in without any sort of hassle from security? Not smuggle, just carry one in. Obviously loads of people in the audience had em, I’m just wondering if the venue actually cared.

PopMatters talks to Britt Daniel about making records the Spoon way. Gimme Fiction is out May 10 and they play Lee’s Palace June 5.

Looks like there’s a payoff for waiting the four months for the North American release of Mercury Rev’s The Secret Migration on May 17. The Amazon listing indicates that it comes with a bonus disc, and not some piddly one or two tracker – this one’s got nine extra tracks. Huzzah.

The Houston Chronicle asks Jeff Tweedy why Wilco holds such appeal for music geeks. Answer? Because he’s one of us. One of us. From Largehearted Boy.

More Cowbell sent me this Questionable Content comic strip which I found amusingly-bang on until the last panel. As if these guys would even KNOW any girls.

JAM! talks to Kevin Smith and Neil Gaiman about making films based on comic books in a market where everything and anything from the funny pages is being adapted for celluloid. Gaiman also reveals his plans for the film version of Death: The High Cost Of Living:

“It’s a nice, cheap, low-budget movie about a miserable teen and a girl who thinks she may be death and the day in New York they spend together. The only reason I’m directing is that I don’t want anyone (messing) it up.”

It sounds like he’s dispensing with the whole Endless angle, and I don’t think it’ll suffer for it at all.

And finally, Sin City scribe Frank Miller was profiled on 60 Minutes last week. Via Achtung Baby!.

np – Douglas Heart / I Could See The Smallest Things

Someone ask me how the Ambulance Ltd show in Toronto was last night. Go on, ask me. “Hey Frank, how was the Ambulance show last night?” “SHORT!” I’m talking George Lucas movie central casting short. It’s a shame that that should be the thing that sticks out in my mind the most from this show, but when the headliner plays for under an hour including encore…

Anyway – let’s start at the beginning. The two local openers for this show were acts I’d seen before some time ago and who didn’t make much of an impression the first time around. I was curious to see how they compared now. First was Nassau, who I saw with The Wrens last February, and I think I had the exact same reaction as I did then. Brit-influenced rock dragged down by an excessively lumbering rhythm section. The drummer hit em hard but lacked any of the finesse that might have given the tunes some sort of jump. This is especially ironic considering the band is fronted by ex-GBV drummer Jon McCann, who is probably exponentially better behind the kit than the guy they have. There were a couple tunes that had a bit of energy to them, but they were sadly outnumbered by the plodding ones. Next.

I saw Boy about a year and a half ago opening for Metric at the Horseshoe. Back then, they were a coffee house-ish singer-songwriter folk/pop outfit. Well I guess someone attended some focus group meetings since then, because Boy is now a full-out retro rock machine that sounds suspiciously fashionable. Bouncing around the stage with all the energy that Nassau lacked, they churned out some decent if rote rock’n’roll that was equal parts classic hand-on-hip Stones swagger and 90s “Mad for it” Britpop. Not the sort of thing that really got my engine revving, but good warmup nonetheless.

I’ve already complained about the brevity of the headliner set, so I’ll just let that go and comment on the performance itself, for as long as it lasted. Opening with “Yoga Means Union”, they followed with the next two songs off of LP and I wondered for a moment if they were just going to play the album start to finish (though if they had, it would have probably been a longer show… whoops, there I go again). They filled the middle portion of the set with some new material and wrapped up with the singles from the album, before returning for a one-song encore that was a cover I can’t place (if anyone knows, let me know). They may not have been up there long, but singer/guitarist Marcus Congleton was working up a good sweat anyway, much to the delight of the sizable female portion of the audience.

Since I saw them at SxSW last month, I had a fair idea of what to expect from the show, and again, they were quite polished in their presentation if not particularly animated. They certainly managed to exude an air of aloofness that actually worked with their New York cool mystique, but they said they were really happy to be here so we could probably just take their word for it. Musically, they’ve stripped away much of the atmospherics that make the recorded versions of the songs so interesting, instead favouring a drier, punchier presentation. Luckily, the songs are, for the most part, strong enough to impress in whichever context.

So yeah, I guess I have to say I was somewhat disappointed by the show. Neither opener really did much for me and the headliners called it a day just as things were really getting going. It seems gauche to try and break it down to an entertainment-for-dollar equation, but… I’m glad it wasn’t an expensive ticket. Oh well. Photos here. Man those Mod Club lights are crazy.

Chart has the scoop on the new Broken Social Scene records. That’s, right, records. Plural. They’ve got three albums worth of material and will be staggering releases starting the Fall.

It finally has a name! Fountains Of Wayne’s oft-delayed b-sides comp will come out June 28 bearing the monicker of Out-Of-State Plates and to make up for the delay, it’ll be a double-disc set. Billboard has full details, including the fact that it in addition to boasting a couple of new tracks, it will mark the first official release of their “…Baby, One More Time” cover. They originally recorded it way back in 1999, but refused to release it as the label wanted to make it a single and they were wary of being labelled as a novelty act or a one-hit wonder. Nope, they held their ground and it eventually paid off as they’re now recognized as being the purveyors of that artistic monument known as “Stacy’s Mom”.

The Go! Team will be at Lee’s Palace July 13. I know some people who are going to be very happy about this one.

His Name Is Alive has been added as support for Low’s June 4 show at the Opera House. I just got The Great Destroyer yesterday, and like it quite a bit. This will be a good show.

np – Low / The Great Destroyer

And here we go. Version 6.0. Looks an awful lot like 5.0, doesn’t it? Yeah, shut up. Sorry if you were expecting something more grandiose, but the reason I stuck with the old layout so long was that I liked it. Really. It takes me forever and a day to come up with decent designs, so when I find something that works, you bet your sweet bippy that I’m going to stick with it for a while. I call it a fresh coat of paint, and it is – it just happens to be the same colour. I realize it’s a little odd rolling something new out on the day of the week I have the least traffic, but this is the only day I’ve got the time to get it set up and debug anything that comes up.

Revisions this time around are of the more pragmatic sort – the layout is wider, obviously, so there’s less scrolling and more overall real estate. In fact, I’ve got so much more space that I don’t know what to do with all of it – case in point, the little Loveless abstraction up in the top right. That’s just… there. If I have banners or announcements or something, I’ll post them there, but for now, it is what it is. I’ve eliminated pop-ups for reviews and photos (thank God) and made some marked improvements in the concert photo albums. My MP3 of the week will now update itself automatically, instead of me having to do it manually, so I can load up tracks months in advance and at the stroke of midnight on Saturdays, bam – new selection. The links section has been updated and expanded, things are hopefully easier to use and navigate, and I think the overall look and feel is less cluttered, more usable.

The site’s not done by any stretch of the imagination. What I have done is gone in and thoroughly cleaned up all the backend code – I’ve reduced the amount of code in the backend by maybe 30%. Dear God, I’m a much better programmer now than I was two years ago. It’s much much faster, leaner, and cleaner now, and more scaleable – meaning I can add to the site more easily than before, if I so desire. And I do, really. I’ve got some ideas that I will try to put into action in the near future, either here or elsewhere, barring any extreme bouts of sloth on my part. I’ve got a couple of annex-like servers that I’m spreading my hosting and bandwidth usage across, so running out of space or tranfer quotas shouldn’t be an issue. You probably wouldn’t have noticed it being an issue in the past, but it was always a concern. Now, hopefully less so.

You’ve probably also noticed the big ol’ empty column down the right-hand side… well, that’s was going to be ad space – nothing horribly sinister, just those Google AdWords and BlogAds things that are becoming ubiquitous, but I’m having second thoughts. What do you think? Are they horribly annoying? Would I be “selling out”? I’m truly on the fence. If I do try them out, I’ll more than likely pull them if they don’t actually net any sort of revenue. If it can’t pay for, say, a concert or a CD a month, then nuts to it. Nuts, I say. I’ll fill up the space with corn bread recipes or something.

I had a moderate-length discourse about why I would feel compelled to seek advertising money or solicit donations, but have decided not to bother with it. The reasons and rationale should be self-evident and I can’t be bothered to write it up. There will be no hard sell, no cajoling, none of that. Yes, this blog takes a helluva lot of my time and a modest amount of capital on my part, but I’m not doing this for the money. I certainly won’t turn it down if offered, but I do this because it’s fun for me. Exhausting at (most) times, but fun.

But to take this to a slightly higher level view, I have been giving much thought to the future of this site in recent months. Not IF the site will have a future (though I admit that wasn’t necessarily a given), but what that future will entail. This site has been a success beyone my wildest imagining since I started it two and a half years ago, not that I actually had any sort of yardstick for what constituted “success”. I’m quite proud of it and don’t want to tamper, but am wary of treading water as well. Grow or die, right? I’m still not sure where this train of thought will lead me, or even what I’m trying to say. There was supposed to be some sort of profundity here, but I seem to be unable to string together more than a couple coherent thoughts in a row, here. It’s been a long week and I’m tired.

So… that’s it for now. Regular programming will resume tomorrow. Thanks for stopping by.

np – Douglas Heart / Douglas Heart